Pioneering 1966 Texas Western basketball team to be inducted into Hall of Fame

Published 5:30 am, Friday, September 7, 2007

David Lattin, who played at Worthing, was the starting center on the celebrated 1966 Texas Western team.

David Lattin, who played at Worthing, was the starting center on the celebrated 1966 Texas Western team.

Photo: BRETT COOMER, CHRONICLE

These Miners knew how to move mountains

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His Texas Western College Miners made history and perhaps even helped alter the course of history. For this, Don Haskins' 1966 national champions will be the first true, single-entity team at any level to be enshrined tonight in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

But ask Haskins about them now and he still doesn't know whether to laugh or cheer or weep or scream out loud. Perhaps never has a coach felt more conflicted about such a special group of his players. Truth be told, he loved them and he hated them. And, 41 years later, he continues to debate which was the stronger emotion.

"Never had a harder-to-coach group," Haskins insists. "We'd need five hours to get 2 1/2 hours work done. The minute that game ended was the happiest moment of my life."

Bittersweet memories

That game was Texas Western 72, Kentucky 65. And it wasn't because he had just knocked off the legendary
Adolph Rupp
's Wildcats for the
NCAA
title in what has come to be viewed as some of the most famous and significant 40 minutes of basketball ever played.

"I was so damn sick of that team," Haskins says, "I just wanted it over."

The last straw? He swears that during a pregame strategy session, two of the Miners dozed off while he spoke.

Writing in his recently re-released autobiography Slam Dunk to Glory, Houston's David Lattin said seeing 14,000 white faces plus the giant Confederate flags being waved by Kentucky's rabid fans made him realize "that, in their view ... there was absolutely no doubt which was the better race ... I instinctively grasped what a defeat would mean. Black Americans could not stand the setback of a defeat. I could not go home if we lost this game. Amid this ocean of white racism, we couldn't lose."

Rupp and his all-white Wildcats were symbols of the Old South, a place where blacks either "knew their place" or risked dire consequences. The Miners also had white players on their roster, but, because only their seven black players took the floor that evening, Texas Western-Kentucky is now held up as a watershed event in America's civil-rights movement.

Rosa Parks. The Selma-to-Montgomery marches. Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. Haskins' Miners. They're all part of the same continuum, the same righteous cause.

'Young punk' as a coach

In real time, however, the fiery, often prickly "young punk" (Haskins' own term) of a coach was only trying to win another basketball game, not make any grandiose social statements. He will go to his grave insisting he didn't realize he had stuck with an all-black lineup from start to finish until a friend mentioned it to him later over coffee.

No matter the man's intentions, the way the script played out got him voted into the Hall of Fame a decade ago. That's fortunate because the crusty 77-year-old Haskins won't be attending the team's induction ceremony. Beset by a laundry list of physical maladies, he is too infirm to make the long trip from El Paso.

For all the gruff talk, not being there is going to
hurt.

"Look, I never said they weren't gamers," Haskins said of the Miners. "They just didn't like to practice, and they were good enough to get away with it. Bobby Joe (Hill) would have rather take a whipping than come to practice."

So, has Haskins yet forgiven the Miners their trespasses?

"No," he barked. "But I couldn't be happier for them (about the Hall of Fame). They damn sure deserve it."

'We had some big egos'

The 6-6 Lattin, who had early become Houston's first high school All-American after leading Worthing to the black state championship in 1962, concedes the Miners definitely marched to their own cocky drum beat. They were, after all, a team of "thoroughbreds, not donkeys."

"We had some big egos," he said. "But we always got along real well. We shared the ball. We liked each other. We were always a team when it came time to play."

Although some of it was pure Hollywood hokum, the 2006 Disney film Glory Road provided the impetus for making the Miners the Hall's sixth collective entry, after the Harlem Globetrotters, the New York Rens, the Original Celtics, the Buffalo Germans and Dr. James Naismith's 1891 gym class, for whose benefit Naismith invented basketball.

Attorney Steve Tredennick, a sharp-shooting guard for Haskins the year before the championship season, approached the Hall on the Miners' behalf after the movie's release.

When Hall of Fame director John DoLeva proved receptive, Tredennick took charge of both the successful application process and the subsequent fundraising effort to cover the costs for Texas Western's 34-deep traveling party.

While it's a shame Haskins won't be part of the festivities, he will have someone stand in for him, a fellow named Herman Carr.

Carr, who is black, and Haskins worked in a feed store in Enid, Okla., when they were kids. Becoming friends, they battled frequently and ferociously on the basketball court. Haskins recalls a particularly sweltering afternoon when they decided to retire for a drink of water. There were, of course, two fountains, one for whites and one for "coloreds."